The Empty Storefronts of New York: A Panoramic View

They proliferate like gaps in an otherwise welcoming smile, vacant storefronts along New York City’s most popular retail corridors.

They are stripped of their contents and their signs, replaced by For Rent banners that can be seen along entire stretches of otherwise thriving shopping zones.

“When you walk the streets, you see vacancies on every block in all five boroughs, rich or poor areas — even on Madison Avenue, where you used to have to fight to get space,” said Faith Hope Consolo, head of retail leasing for Douglas Elliman Real Estate, who said the increase in storefront vacancies in New York City had created “the most challenging retail landscape in my 25 years in real estate.”

A survey conducted by Douglas Elliman found that about 20 percent of all retail space in Manhattan is currently vacant, she said, compared with roughly 7 percent in 2016.

While a commercial crisis might more likely be associated with periods of economic distress, this one comes during an era of soaring prosperity, in a city teeming with tourism and booming with development.

That has aggravated the vacancy problem by producing a glut of new commercial real estate.

Particularly hard hit are gentrifying areas in Brooklyn and many of Manhattan’s top retail strips in some of the world’s priciest shopping districts, from Broadway in SoHo to Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side.

Soaring rents and competition from online shopping have forced out many beloved mom-and-pop shops, which many residents say decimates neighborhoods and threatens New York’s unique character. Then there is the blight that shuttered stores bring, including vagrants, graffiti and trash.

Some tenants blame the warehousing of storefronts by landlords waiting for development deals or zoning changes, or simply holding out for top rental dollars from large corporate retailers like drugstores, banks and restaurant chains. But even many national chains have shrunk their roster of stores.

Some landlords say they simply cannot find retail tenants willing to lock in long-term leases at rents that enable them to meet building payments. Others say that retailers are not biting, even at bargain rents. Whatever the factors, the vacancies are changing the look of the city’s streetscape.

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The West Side of Eighth Avenue between 42nd and 43rd Streets is flooded with tourists flocking to Times Square and commuters heading to local transit hubs. The block should be a retailer’s dream, but the only open store is a Duane Reade pharmacy branch.

A string of shuttered storefronts has turned the block into a barren stretch of no man’s land reminiscent of Times Square’s bad old days. Street hustlers eye passers-by; stumbling men bum cigarettes and argue; others push rickety shopping carts or snooze on the sidewalk.

The exodus of the block’s tenants includes two souvenir shops and a Thai restaurant. The longstanding Show World sex shop — the last in the pornographic empire of Times Square’s prince of porn, Richard Basciano, who died last year — closed in May, but its sign still touts “Adult 25 cent Movies.”

Now, a sidewalk fruit vendor with a handwritten sign, “Fresh Fruit NYC,” sets up outside the shuttered stores.

“With no stores there, the drug addicts, drug dealers, prostitutes, they all have the run of the block,” said Joaquin Borrely, a longtime resident of the Times Square Hotel, a single-room-occupancy residence for formerly homeless people. “It’s a bad situation here at night. The tourists don’t have a problem if they keep walking, but it’s no playground.”

Julie Ross stood outside the Greenpoint Tavern on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and looked at the nine empty storefronts on the block, between North Sixth and North Seventh Streets.

“I heard the rents on Bedford are now as high as Rodeo Drive,” she said, referring to the iconic retail mecca in Beverly Hills, Calif.

A flower stand nearby, outside a vacated deli, bore the graffiti warning “Don’t Gentrify.”

Too late. Down the avenue, Whole Foods and other national chains have arrived and the struggling rockers toting guitar cases have been replaced by moneyed residents pushing strollers and carrying yoga mats.

But Ms. Ross, a punk singer and bassist, is still rocking, and supporting herself by bartending at Greenpoint Tavern.

“People move to New York for a different experience,” she said. “But these are stores you can find in any mall in America.”

On a bustling stretch of Canal Street, just west of Broadway, graffiti covers the metal security gates on shuttered stores; vendors sell knockoff handbags and sunglasses; and pot dealers conduct business in plain sight.

It has the look, and frenetic feel, of New York in the 1980s.

“The only difference is, business was better in the ’80s,” said Marty Landsman, co-owner of Canal Rubber, one of the last businesses on Canal Street that still serves industrial clients, a throwback to when the strip was lined with such stores. Now Canal Street is lined with empty stores, and real estate speculators have bought several buildings for future development.

“I’ve been here all my life and it was never high-end, but every store was always occupied,” Mr. Landsman said. “But commercially now, it’s a decimated area.”

“Space For Rent” is the current feature at a movie theater on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn.

The theater was converted into retail space years ago, but the banner gracing its marquee sums up the local theme of storefront vacancies.

The American Apparel branch that occupied the former theater closed last year. A shoe repair shop and several other businesses on the block have shut down, as has the Four Seasons Cleaners across the avenue.

The former theater’s doorway is befouled with vomit and trash, and its marquee serves as a shelter for a bus stop out front. Melanie Severo, who was waiting for a bus, called it depressing to see one empty store after another.

“It makes the neighborhood look bad,” she said, “and you get the feeling that it’s just fueled by landlord greed, holding out for another Chipotle or another bank branch.”

The Lenox Finest Deli & Grocery, on the southeast corner of Lenox Avenue and 116th Street in Harlem, closed years ago, but business continues on the corner with sidewalk vendors setting up every day outside.

“We might as well take advantage of how busy this corner is,” said Maurice Blyden, 52, who was selling watermelons.

He began counting the shuttered storefronts within a block or two and quickly ran out of fingers. He called them reminders of what is taking place in Harlem.

“The owners renovate the buildings and then hold out for more money, but what happens to the workers at those stores after they shut?” the said. “They get run out of Harlem because the rent is so high.”

Across the avenue is Timeless Fashions, a tiny clothing boutique offering men’s outfits and hats in the classic Harlem debonair style. It stands in stark contrast to newer businesses with slick modern décor and trendy food offerings at higher prices, and the small store is struggling to avoid falling victim to the sea change in the neighborhood.

“These vacant stores you see, they were mom and pop businesses like us,” said a salesman, Chuck Mason. “We have fewer customers now because Harlem’s not really Harlem no more, the way we knew it,” said a salesman, Chuck Mason. “You got wealthy people moving in and newer kinds of businesses.”

A rash of empty storefronts on Nostrand Avenue between St. Marks Avenue and Park Place in Brooklyn are covered with graffiti.

Some residents view these store closings as a consequence, and a harbinger, of the neighborhood’s changing demographic as more professionals arrive seeking alternatives to Manhattan or more gentrified parts of Brooklyn.

The influx of newcomers can be a mixed blessing for the hair shops, bodegas, liquor stores and other longstanding businesses. Their consumer dollar is welcome, but their arrival also inevitably means the opening of food and coffee spots making the area more trendy and driving up residential and commercial rents.

“The change has been successful for me, but a lot of my neighbors have been priced out of the area,” said Debbie Hardy, whose boutique, Martine’s Dream, attracts longstanding residents and newcomers. “They don’t want to leave, but they’re being swept out because they were paying $1,200 to live here and they just can’t afford $2,100.”

She said some businesses had remained open because “some landlords do see the benefit of choosing human beings over the money.”

Bleecker Street, once emblematic of bohemian culture, has morphed in recent years — at least west of Seventh Avenue — into a corridor for designer flagship stores and trendy boutiques willing to pay upward of $25,000 per month for modest-size spaces.

Today, the stretch has become one of the most extreme examples of retail blight in Manhattan, with dozens of empty stores. Many hangers-on are renting on a pop-up basis with month-to-month leases.

“It’s depressing to walk down Bleecker Street now,” said Danny Silberstein, 26, a local resident. “It’s like a ghost town.”

With rare exceptions — one being Magnolia, the cupcake shop made famous by a “Sex and the City” episode — retail activity on the block has slowed.

William Abramson, who represents landlords on Bleecker as director of sales and leasing at Buchbinder & Warren Realty Group, called it misguided to blame landlord greed for storefront vacancies.

“Most landlords are not waiting for top dollar — they’re waiting for good tenants and they’re often willing to take less than market rent,” he said. “They really care about the city and they know there’s nothing worse for the neighborhood than a dark store. The problem is, there aren’t a whole lot of tenants out there, and a lot of retailers are looking for short term.”

On Bleecker, near Perry Street, a vacant storefront is being used temporarily by the Shakespeare in the Parking Lot theatrical troupe. On nearby shops, a local artist, who goes by the anonymous name Symbol, has pasted farcical posters resembling huge Monopoly cards, listing soaring rents.

The artist, in an interview, said he was hoping to “highlight the situation that the typical New Yorker is frozen out, and all we get is pharmacies, banks and national brands, and we all lose.”

“High Traffic Retail, available immediately,” reads the For Rent signs in a pair of shuttered stores near the southeast corner of Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, where sidewalks are thick with tourists and office workers.

Heading down Fifth Avenue, other signs sing the same refrain — “Space Available,” “Retail Space for Lease.”

An empty space vacated by a Duane Reade sits across 34th Street from the Empire State Building, and two large empty spaces sit across the avenue from Lord and Taylor, the century-old department store stalwart, which itself is shutting next year citing loss of customers to the internet.

“There’s too much storefront space flooding the market,” Ms. Consolo said, especially from large developments with ample commercial space, like the World Trade Center, Hudson Yards and Brookfield Place.

Danny Levine, the fourth-generation owner of the family-owned J. Levine Co. Judaica shop on 30th Street just off Fifth Avenue, said many Manhattan landlords are themselves financially squeezed and have to “mercilessly go for the absolute highest rent they can get.”

As for his own shop, he said, “God has ordained we stay in business — we own our building.”

Lida Pllumbaj, a hairstylist who recently opened a salon on the Upper West Side, routinely walks Broadway counting the empty storefronts as an economic barometer of the area.

“So many empty stores, right on Broadway, right here in Manhattan,” Ms. Pllumbaj said.

A study last year by Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer’s office counted 188 vacant storefronts along the 13-mile length of Broadway in Manhattan.

The highest vacancy rates, upwards of 12 percent, were on this Upper West Side stretch of Broadway, according to another study issued last year by City Councilwoman Helen Rosenthal, who co-sponsored a recent law creating tax breaks and other measures to help small business owners keep their stores.

Ms. Pllumbaj opened Lida’s Beauty Lounge on Broadway near 99th Street after a consignment shop closed in that space and is concerned about the vacant storefronts near her salon. A Turkish restaurant and mattress store both closed recently, and large anchor spaces on the two western corners of Broadway and 96th Street are also empty.

She said she was optimistic that she would survive.

“The only thing you can’t do online,” she said, “is hair.”